On Switching Teams

So I'm not quite nocturnal just yet, perhaps Crepuscularly-curious. Today I woke up around the same time – 2-ish – but didn't shower until about 7 p.m., so by the time I was ready to go out it was 9:30 and everything was closing up. I know have to wake up early in order to conduct with the rest of humanity in my time zone.

Clearly this is not good. My mom's birthday is coming up. I have to buy a card, dude. It's not like there's an all-night Hallmark around the corner from my crack house.

That'd be sleazy.

Of Indications

Not saying I need a girlfriend or anything, but I can now solve a Ribik's Cube in under two minutes.

Clearly something needs to fill the time.

Of Poor Choices

I spent the better half of the morning throwing up.

All-in-all, it was not the best decision I ever made.


On the up-side, I didn't feel bad about doing absolutely nothing all day.

On Accuracy

Every time it doesn't end in a wet t-shirt contest the term "Bridal Shower" is misleading.

On Subtlety

I don't like saying I'm unemployed. I am "willfully so," "willfully unemployed." I am "a slacker." I have no job by choice, and for that matter I only have no job until I sell a single piece of writing and get reimbursed for it.

Yeah, then I'm self-employed. Suddenly I'm a hard worker and a go-getter, aren't I? I'm a serious but creative guy. I'm the guy who could be very successful at a major firm but risked it all and took a chance to go into business for himself, be his own boss, make his own hours, spend more time with his family. Yeah, suddenly I'm that guy everyone wishes they could be like. Moms'll see me with a stroller at the sideline of my kid's soccer game and wonder, "Is he married? Look how good with the kids he is! Are those khakis Dockers? Look at his expensive cell phone. He must make so much but he's completely ignoring it for his kid. HE IS THE PERFECT MAN I MUST HAVE HIM."

Yeah, that sounds a lot better than "living with his mom."

On Sarah Silverman and Why We Jews Claim She's So Hot

See, it's not really because she's actually insanely hot. You just have to understand she's really hot for a Jew. I mean we're not typically a very attractive people. More often than not we praise med student loans and respecting one's mother above the ability to dance or, say, not use one's wallet as a booster seat for our offspring.

So yes, we know Ms. Silverman is no Megan Fox, though I'm sure she also enjoys giant robots performing bathroom humor. However Sarah's nose won't quite double as a glass cutter and her hair doesn't threaten to choke her in her sleep, so, please, just give us this one. We promise not to tell the Egyptians. Or Jimmy Kimmel.

Of Luck nd Zombies

I seem to have a disproportionate number of dreams about surviving a zombie outbreak.

I also seem to have more Nerf guns than an eight year-old.



Man, if we ever run across a horde of Nerf-intolerant zombies I'm the guy you want to be around.

On Lyttle-Lytton

Stephen Hawking looked down at the failing computer model and sighed to himself.

"Well," he said, "Some days you're Erwin Shroedinger, and some days you're his cat and you're not."

Of Real Conversations

Me: "It's too heavy."
Brother: "We should get a camel."
Me: "Actually, you shouldn't overload your camel."
Brother: "Why?"
Me: "Well you know the expression 'the straw that broke the camel's back?'"
Brother: "Yeah?"
Me: Well it's usually figurative, but there's also a literal lessen there. 'Don't overload your camel.'"

On Hipness

As Tower of Power once posited in an incredibly awesome song, "What is Hip?"

Sometimes I like to think that's I've got a pretty good grip on hipness. I may not always show it, but I've got some Fonzie-level coolness tucked away in my closet I'm ready to bust out.

And then I realize that I keep that coolness next to not one but two Optimus Prime transformers and I think, "Okay, maybe not."

On Abstaining

Anti-drug commercials seem to like talking dogs. Who doesn't, really?

There a dog in the squiggle-vision anti-pot commercial that is all like, "Yo, come play with me!" but the guy's too baked to go outside.

Then there's another one where this real cute teen girl is in the kitchen gettin' her grub on and her little terrier pops up on a stoll and tells her she's changed since she started toking up, and he'll be outside if she decides to come hang out with him again.

I mean what's the lesson behind this? Dogs make you feel bad?

All I'm getting from this is that if I smoke weed my dog will start fucking talking.

And that's pretty fucking sweet.

On Cialis

I'm watching a Cialis commercial and I'm wondering to myself why it shows a half a dozen couples in side-by-side bathtubs outdoors. It's an erection pill, but all the couples are relaxing in separate tubs.

I've never been around a hot chick in a bathtub and said, "Ooh, babe. You look so fine right now. You just make me want to hop into a tub that looks exactly like that but is at least a foot away and restricts bodily contact o just our hands. Ooh, baby, yeah. That's hot."

It's always been more like, "You're naked … fucking sweet."

I HAVE MADE AN ART!

Yes, tonight's update shall only be funny if you are a tremendous nerd, but then it'll be bloody brilliant.

First up, here's the result of me trying out the new grayscale brush pens I had my mom pay for in exchange for tech support (click it to see the full size, obviously):












Yes, it's streaky and I should have gone directly to Copic markers, but these were cheap.


Next up, a sneak preview of what I've been working on late at night recently.


















Without pinning myself down too much, there's this steampunk girl and her uncle just happens to be Nikola Tesla. Yes, that is his beloved white pigeon and, yes, that is a steam-powered exoskeleton with an AC electric Tesla coil backpack for extended use.

Next up: DIRIGIBLES!

On Dumb Bitches

A dumb bitch is a specific term, denoting a woman who makes other women look bad through her almost willful idiocy.

To wit: I am friends on Facebook with a dumb bitch who used to actually be a friend until her dumbness and bitchiness actually affected me directly. This dumb bitch writes the following status update, because we all obviously care what she thinks:

"[Dumb Bitch] is tired of rain, family and being unemployed."

Now family I can understand. I really do. But the rain? Really? You're fucking unemployed. Where the fuck do you have to go that's so fucking important when you don't have a Summer job? To every dumb bitch out there: no one cares about your life and they're tired of taking it up the ass trying to accommodate your dumb bitchitude. Stop being a dumb bitch.

On Bro Bands

I went to see O.A.R. perform at Madison Square Garden a few years back. I figured why not? I knew two of their songs and I rather liked those two songs, so why not? Unfortunately I had underestimated the type of people who predominantly like bands such as O.A.R., that is bros.

Now I thoroughly enjoyed the show and I found the music enjoyable, despite not being able to understand a single word they sang and my intense dislike of any music that relies heavily on jamming to sustain its appeal. The fact of the matter is, though, O.A.R. is a bro band.

"What is a bro band?" you ask? Well as my friend Mike so aptly stated at MSG that night, "It's like they turned Madison Square Garden into a giant frat house."

Yes, a bro band is defined by TheUrbanDictionary as "an expansion of jock-rock which is the male parallel to the boy band; any music that causes 'Bros' to enter a state of wild abandon, swinging their arms violently, spilling beer and lip-syncing every lyric perfectly, essentially causing them to act like crazed club-girls.

"Examples of Bro-Bands include Blues Traveler, Dave Mathews, The Dispatch, James Blunt, O.A.R., and others."

And I can totally quote that because I added it myself a few weeks after that show. The best was when the random ad on that page was for the new DMB Live album. Wicked.

On Conversationalism

I think if I could have dinner with any person of interest ever, I'd probably go with Nichola Tesla.

Yes, he was possibly one of the most brilliant individuals ever, but he also knew Mark Twain and fell in love with a pigeon.

Plus, if anyone asks "Why, Tesla?" I would have had him draw out some plans for his deathray so I could zap people who actually questioned my or Tesla's awesomenessitude.

On Quality Control

So who do you complain to when the "teenager" in "Teenage Violations" is clearly pushing 35?

Racism Is Alive And Well!

How else could you explain the relative success of George Lopez?

Believe me, when a white guy stars in his own sitcom as the wise-cracking, stingy over-protective father with a teen daughter, a double-standard for his young son and an uncharacteristically attractive wife we call it According to Jim, The King of Queens, Grounded for Life, All In the Family, and any of a thousand other names for the same crappy product.

When a brown man does it suddenly it's the best thing since, well, Bernie Mac.

Ah … progress.

On the Generation Gap

The other day I walked into Best Buy with my mother. I picked up a copy of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog [PLUG! MONEY PLEASE].

While I was there my mom picked out copies of the new Green Day album and Weezer's Pinkerton.

It bothers me that my mother has a better collection of CDs I listen to than I physically have CDs.

On Coming Full Circle (Har Har)

So I found the bar where like a solid 10% of my graduating class from high school goes on a Friday night. I'm not saying it was the bottom 10%, but me going back there is pretty up in the air.

On Italian Food

Within 5 miles of my house there are over 17 pizza places.

And yet I still can't find a decent location to dump a body. Huh. Weird.

On The Voyager Disc

If aliens find our radio signals and decide to do even the most preliminary internet research on us, they will discover our women sport heavy body modification and little if any clothing, which is all designed to draw attention away from their terrifying primary genitalia.

Also, they'll find we fucking love Rick Astley.

Idea for T-Shirt

Oedipus stands over slain old man by carriage, clutching his cougar bride.

Exclaims: "Merciful Zeus! I've become my father!"

On Gender Equality

We tried playing shirts-and-skins with girls before. It was distracting, but not nearly as distracting as they thought it would be.

What has become of us?

On Athleticism

I'm starting to keep a pair of good track shoes in my car.

It's not because I'll use them a lot, it's just frisbee is the only thing I do that requires something other than boots or Converse, so I might as well keep them in the trunk next to my spare disc, grappling hook, holy water, and all the stuff that gets about as much use as a eunic's gonads.

The Third Law of Phonodynamics

The likelihood of the phone ringing is directly correlated to the likelihood of a person sitting down on the toilet.

On Aging Gracefully

My grandfather has Alzheimer's and a bad fall at home shattered his hip, resulting in a brief stay at the nursing home/rehab center right down the street from where I live. This of course made his Alzheimer's worse, basically necessitating his permanent residence there. This now means that we all have to become acquainted with the rest of the permanent fixtures at the home.

Mr. Wineman is an elderly Jewish man. Wheelchair-bound and bespectacled, senile, but spry enough to attempt to flee the home with random old women in tow, all at the ripe old age of 103. Let that wash over you for a moment. One hundred and three years old. There is no funnier age. At all.

Now Mr. Wineman has a touch of the dementia as well, so he will often wait around the lobby and, when the mood strikes him, begin wheeling himself towards the front door, professing that whatever woman outside is his wife come to visit him. "That's my wife! My wife!" Mr. Wineman would call, until the orderlies or any random passerby who knows the drill could at least partially convince him that his wife will not be visiting for another half hour. Mrs. Wineman, until recently, was housed in a separate elder-care facility better equiped to deal with her specific conditions and was certinly not capable of visiting at all. When they were in the same place, in fact, they reportedly bickered constantly. Moreover, Mr. Wineman has a habit of hitting on all the older ladies in his home, and on more than one ocassion has attempted to pull my 80 year-old grandmother away from my 83 year-old grandfather claiming, "He's too old for you." My grandmother, who looks about 68, simply shoos him away and sprints out to her car and drives away, as she is in fact fully capable of bitchslapping the rest of humanity into submission. (Mental note: Mac OSX spellcheck recognizes "bitchslapping" as a valid transitive verb.)

Well last week an orderly came to Mr. Wineman with some incredible news. "Mr. Wineman!" she said. "Your wife is here! Let's go see your wife! I'll take you to go see your wife!" And with all the expression of a humbled child being informed that, yes, he really would have to start school again come September, Mr. Wineman got very sad and quiet. Having recovered from her more serious ailments, 98 year-old Mrs. Wineman had finally been transfered into his home.

As they entered into his wife's room, Mr. Wineman with his hooked and old hand grabbed firm hold of his wheelchair's sides and halted all progress. "Mr. Wineman?" the orderly asked. "Mr. Wineman? What's wrong? Mr. Wineman, are you okay? What's wrong."

"Grannihhuhhnnm…" Mr Wineman replied.

"Mr. Wineman…? Do you- Don't you wanna see your wife?"

And in a statement that gives me terrific hope, not for myself or anyone else really, not for growing old or truly loving someone or any grand metaphore, but for the sheer beautiful fact that people will quite simply never understand eachother. Mr. Wineman craned his head up to the junior orderly who was no longer trying to force his wheelchair forward and stated the following message:





"Eh. It's complicated…."

On Timing, Pt 4

If there were ever a time to tell a person you love them, it's certainly not over the phone, hammered at a quarter past one in the morning.

On Ageism

When I shout at strange kids to get off my damned lawn they yell back, "Screw you, old man!"

When Clint Eastwood does it he starts and then wins a gang war.

Something here is clearly amiss.

How to Know You're Growing Up: Method 359

You take a chicken breast out of the freezer at lunchtime and prepare chicken cordon bleu with a side salad for dinner. Your mother eats a poptart.

Anal Fissure

Anal Fissure - n. 1. A rectal tear caused by undo strain during a bowel movement; 2. What happens when you watch more than one episode of Daisy of Love in a single sitting.

On Good Ideas

I should really stop talking to girls I vaguely like right before they go off to fuck their boyfriends. It just cuts the conversations short.